Today’s IT organizations are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Most face an avalanche of new bandwidth requirements hitting their networks, yet too few resources to support the business’ needs. In 2013, three out of four organizations will not have any additional wide area network (WAN) budget (Nemertes Research). That means 75% of IT teams will not be able to buy more bandwidth to address exponential traffic growth, and will need to re-think their entire approach to the network if they want stay successful. Treading water will not be an option.

If you have an iPhone or you are due for a mobile phone refresh, you would have tuned into Apple’s announcement on the new iPhones as well as the new OS, iOS7. I’ve had my iPhone4 for more than 3 years now so it definitely is decision time.

While we, as the phones’ users, are contemplating a new phone or upgraded OS, what does our other persona, the manager, director, or CIO in charge of our companies’ IT and network, need to consider? Will this impact me? Especially with BYOD policies can webring both our iPhone and iPad – new or just upgraded – and connect them to the company wireless network? The answer is a resounding YES.

I hope everyone is getting excited to take the Journey to the Sunshine State and have packed a few sets of mouse ears. A quick blog post this week as I have already run out of puns. I’d like to encourage you all to check out our Application Visibility and Control (AVC) partners at Cisco Live Orlando! There are three that I’d love to highlight.

InfoVista will be showing off their Application Visibility Solution in the Cisco Partner Pavilion and theater, ActionPacked! Networks has a very special announcement about LiveAction and can be found in booth 201, and Plixer’s Netflow Knights will highlight their full range of netflow support in booth 747 and our Partner Pavilion – and even has a rap video, or so I’ve been told. I can’t wait to see in person what our customers think about our partners’ technologies. Also, come take a look at what Cisco has hidden beneath our huge plastic ears Read More »

What if you could apply application based Quality of Service (QoS) with just a couple clicks? Seriously. If you’ve read this far, I’ll tell you: ActionPacked! Networks, a Cisco Developer Network (CDN) registered partner, recently hosted my colleague, Bob Nusbaum for an awesome webinar and demo.

LiveAction handles QoS, NBAR2, and other AVC features easily and comprehensively

Bob described Cisco’s perspective on the future of routing – it’s all about applications! – and ActionPacked! gave a great demo of LiveAction software. Our attendees learned how to securely:

Discover and prioritize 1400+ applications in your network

Re-route groups of applications based on real-time network performance

Reduce bandwidth expansion costs

The webinar is a deep-dive on Cisco AVC and explains how to simplify and speed delivery of applications with Cisco ISR-AX Routers and ActionPacked! LiveAction software.

Block Bit Torrent with AVC & LiveAction
If you don’t have time for a 60-minute webinar, take a look at the great video combining Cisco AVC and LiveAction to detect and block Bit Torrent.

This week, I invited Chris Cullan, product marketing manager, business
services solutions at InfoVista to discuss his “grumpy old man syndrome (GOMS).”

Not really a grumpy old man, Canadian

Chris will share how Cisco and InfoVista are working together to solve GOMS by giving communications service providers (CSPs) and their enterprise customers the ability to bridge the application – user – business gap. Specifically, Cisco and InfoVista can help CSPs and customers detect and apply QoS to over 1400 applications, including bit-torrent, p2p apps, Netflix, Youtube and about 1400 others – without probes and at a hardware cost up to 30% lower than standalone appliances. Cisco also produces monthly updates to application signatures that can be implemented without interruption to the network.

One thing really annoys me…okay, many things really annoy me, and the number seems to increase as I get older. I call it “grumpy old man syndrome”. My wife just calls it painful. But for this audience, the one thing I am referring to is “dumb pipes”. I am continually frustrated by the industry’s willingness to down-play its core value.

Some of the individuals posting to this site, including the moderators, work for Cisco Systems. Opinions expressed here and in any corresponding comments are the personal opinions of the original authors, not of Cisco. The content is provided for informational purposes only and is not meant to be an endorsement or representation by Cisco or any other party. This site is available to the public. No information you consider confidential should be posted to this site. By posting you agree to be solely responsible for the content of all information you contribute, link to, or otherwise upload to the Website and release Cisco from any liability related to your use of the Website. You also grant to Cisco a worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free and fully-paid, transferable (including rights to sublicense) right to exercise all copyright, publicity, and moral rights with respect to any original content you provide. The comments are moderated. Comments will appear as soon as they are approved by the moderator.